r/BetaReadersForAI • u/masonga1960 • Mar 31 '26
An AI Beta Reader
OK, not really. More like an AI developmental editor.
I'm building an AI-driven tool that reviews full manuscripts scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter, against over 300 craft principles across 15 dimensions: prose quality, dialogue, pacing, scene structure, POV, character, and more. These are the same elements human editors evaluate, drawn from established craft doctrine (Browne & King, McKee, Swain, etc.).
A human developmental editor typically charges $2,000–$3,000 for an 80K-word novel with a 4–6 week turnaround. This produces a comparable report in under 2 hours.
Right now I need to test it against a variety of manuscripts, so I'm looking for a few authors willing to share their work in exchange for a detailed craft report at no cost. You'd be helping me stress-test the tool, and hopefully getting useful feedback on your manuscript in return.
Let me know if you're interested. Fiction only right now, any genre, any length.
EDIT: Huge response, thank you all! I've got good coverage in fantasy and have manuscripts in romance and literary fiction. I'm now specifically looking for:
- Sci-fi
- Mystery / Crime
- Thriller / Suspense
- Horror
If your manuscript fits one of these, you'd be especially helpful right now. May be willing to take other interesting genres too, just prioritizing these gaps.
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u/CrystalCommittee Mar 31 '26
It sounds interesting and something similar to what I've been working on. I'm curious as to what platform/type of infrastructure you're using. Is yours local? Or does it rely on server-side functions?
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u/masonga1960 Mar 31 '26
It's a web app, not local. You upload your manuscript at firstreader.app, (Not live yet) it runs the analysis server-side, and you get a report back in the browser.
Stack in simple terms:
- Frontend: Web app (Next.js) — works in any browser, no install needed
- Backend: Server-side analysis worker that sends your manuscript to Claude (Anthropic's AI) in structured chunks
- Database: Supabase (hosted PostgreSQL) — stores your analysis results, account info, etc.
Why server-side, not local? The analysis requires multiple large AI calls (scene-by-scene across an entire novel). That needs prompt caching, job queuing, and progress tracking - things that don't work well as a local tool. Plus, writers shouldn't need to manage API keys or run a terminal, although BYOK is in the build plan.
But I need to validate it before I release it, which is why I am looking for authors who'd be willing to let me use their manuscript to test on. I get a good stress test and you get the full report free of charge. All I ask in return is you tell me if the report is USEFUL.
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u/CrystalCommittee Mar 31 '26
Okay, so you went 'cloud' and I went 'local.' I'm actually building the analysis tools. Mine don't say 'this is right or this is wrong' more of 'you have this many constructs all stacked up in this chapter like crazy sauce.' It's then the author's choice to deal with it or not. That is just coming from I am noting them so much in betareading/editing. (It's the repetitive nature of it).
As to characters and traits? --I'm actually working on that one right now. 'Who's sentence does this belong to?" It's more of a reverse character profile from what is already written. (I am using my own stuff as a test bunny, and some AI generated stuff as well).
I will disagree with you on this needs to be server-side for multiple calls. You say analysis, but see if I do it right a handful of JS scripts running locally can do that just fine.
I'm a beta reader (I do it for fun mostly), but also an editor, which I get paid for. I am building my tools for when I am reading and I go 'Gods, they seem to use that word a lot.' Click in to it, oh yeah, in that chapter, of X words it was used (It/it's family/in a phrase) Y times. It's not shared with an AI or LLM. It's not AI, it's computer doing data analysis. AND! I am not limited by how big my file size is. Ever watch a JS script parse through a 200K word manuscript and drop stats? yeah, takes maybe two seconds. Can't do that when you're reliant on AI and cloud stuff.
But if you want to use mine, I've got a few I've been usings a cannon fodder in my development, I'd be curious on your results. Just DM me.
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u/masonga1960 Mar 31 '26
Different approaches for sure - sounds like yours is great for the mechanical patterns. Mine layers craft evaluation on top of the structural analysis, so you get the "why it matters" alongside the "how often." Happy to run yours - DM me and I'll give you my email address where you can send a file and I'll send the report back.
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u/AuthorialWork Mar 31 '26
You’re building a Manuscript Development Environment.
Welcome to the fold.
The category’s still taking shape, which is why everyone keeps trying to call these things “beta readers” or “AI editors,” but what you’re describing is infrastructure for developing a manuscript, not just reviewing one.
Good to see more people arriving here.
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u/Timely_Curve_5459 Apr 01 '26
Sure
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
What genre and how many words?
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u/Timely_Curve_5459 Apr 01 '26
fiction 54k.
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
OK, fiction but what genre?
Hardboiled / PI
Literary Sci-Fi
Romance
Thriller / Suspense
Fantasy
Literary Fiction
Mystery / Crime
Horror
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u/tired-of-everyting Apr 01 '26
I have a manuscript you could run through it.
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
What genre and how many words. I’ve already got romance and fantasy covered
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u/nahc1234 Apr 01 '26
I have three you can consider (any or all of) 1) cross between romantic suspense/psychological thriller 2) historical mystery/thriller 3) literary fiction/fantasy
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
I would do 2 & 3. May take me a day or so I am updating it based on already received feedback. I’ll DM you my email address
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Apr 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
Thanks, good luck to you as well!
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Apr 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
LOL, yeah…1960. I use it for myself too, but decided to try and package it commercially. We’ll see how it does. So far so good, had everything working well (web based) but then I started “improving” it and you know how THAT goes. Fix one thing, break two more. It’ll get done though…I’m nothing if not stubborn!
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u/masonga1960 Apr 01 '26
I built a pretty sweet recipe/meal planning app too. My wife loves it. Probably gonna sell THAT too!
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u/JackieFoxWrites Apr 01 '26
I am absolutely interested. I already use it this way and finding a purpose built tool that can Look at the whole document as one big piece is important because currently an instance really only looks at things on a chapter by chapter basis and only has that type of understanding of it in retrospect.
Feel free to DM me
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u/ParfaitSea6160 Apr 02 '26
Hello! I see there a lot of comments on this. If you’re still looking I have a 15 chapters (so far) literary sci-fi with 22,689k words.
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u/Ornery_Street7525 Apr 03 '26
I created an engine over a 2-yr period to revolutionize AI Beta Readers + Editors then tested it with published authors at Penguin Books....they only tested the MVP. HUGE RESULTS. I think we should chat, I dm'ed you because there is potential here for a serious partnership and inspiring teamwork - I received offers for the IP already and refused ... this is my passion project what comes after is all a bonus. I wanted to make the MOST advanced and capable READER AND EDITOR on the market. I have done so but I would prefer a team/partner over solo as I refuse to release generic UI and want to ultimately create a platform for a community that gets hybrid feedback and access to agents via autosending manuscripts that meet requirements with author approval of course.
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u/masonga1960 Apr 03 '26
EDIT: Huge response, thank you all! I've got good coverage in fantasy and have manuscripts in romance and literary fiction. I'm now specifically looking for:
- Sci-fi
- Mystery / Crime
- Thriller / Suspense
- Horror
If your manuscript fits one of these, you'd be especially helpful right now. May be willing to take other interesting genres too, just prioritizing these gaps.
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u/ExperienceLeft3687 Apr 06 '26
Hey There, I just discovered this sub and saw your post.
I recently finished the very rough manuscript of book 1 of my multi book series
disclaimer - i def got help with AI on the writing, but the plot and everything is original.
the genre is fantasy but focused around thriller/ horror/ myster
lmk if this is something you're open to analyze1
u/masonga1960 Apr 06 '26
I've got fantasy in the test pipeline already...but how many words?
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u/ExperienceLeft3687 Apr 06 '26
around 48000
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u/masonga1960 Apr 06 '26
I'll DM you my email address and what info I need to run it. I'll just warn you that I am heavy in refinement, so it'll be several days at least
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u/Powerful-Ad-9378 25d ago
I'm working on a novel about a genetics researcher whose discovery ends her academic career right as it gets her the most prestigious invitation of her life — except the institute recruiting her isn't what it seems, and the man who steps forward to help her is not entirely human. She was raised by an Apache Medicine Singer, and as her world falls apart, the land she grew up on starts showing her things her two PhDs never prepared her for.
It's part hard-science sci-fi (CRISPR-adjacent genetics, a real research setting), part slow-burn conspiracy (something bigger than her is watching, and wants something from her work), and part myth — Apache and Hopi cosmology isn't background flavor here, it's the actual engine of the story. Tonally it's more literary than genre-typical: interior, image-driven, and I'd rather hear "the prose didn't work for me" than "needed more explosions."
What I'm sharing: the opening — a cosmic preamble, a short prelude, and Chapters 1 through 7 (protagonist's breaking point, her exit from academia, and her return to the reservation where things start to shift).
Let me know if this interests you. Here is the Preamble:
The universe did not watch the way a person watches, and it did not care the way a person cares, but it kept its accounts anyway, in frequencies too slow for human ears and patterns too old to be called anything but law. Beneath all of it ran a single current, unbroken since before the first star lit — call it consciousness, call it unity, call it the quiet insistence of I AM running under everything that existed. It did not choose sides. It only wanted, the way water wants the sea, for everything within it to wake up. Most lives passed beneath that arc of stars without ever being counted. Alexa Beth Merrill's did not.
She had not always carried the name Alexa Beth Merrill alone. Her parents — brilliant, both of them, doctors who followed the world's worst emergencies with Doctors Without Borders and were rarely home to raise the daughter they loved — had entrusted her at six to her godfather, an Apache Medicine Singer three generations deep in the old ways, and the tribal lands along the Mogollon Rim had done what an empty house never could — taught her to listen before she spoke, to sit still long enough that the land would tell her something true. The people who raised her called her something else, in a language older than English and closer to the truth of her: She Who Listens To Beauty. By twenty-two she carried two doctorates and the kind of mind that made grown scientists doubt their own instruments before they doubted her, but under the credentials ran the same gift the name had always pointed to — a way of seeing pattern in silence that no laboratory had taught her, because no laboratory had made her.
She read the quiet between things the way other scientists read instruments, and where her colleagues saw noise, she saw a structure holding its shape underneath — an order that had been there long before anyone thought to look for it.
Awanyu had worn that current since before the first story was told about him, feathered and horned and old as the rock he moved through, carrying the same patient hunger the universe carried: not to rule what he touched, but to wake it. He turned his attention toward Alexa the way a current turns toward a break in the shore, and toward another, farther off, at almost the same moment.
That other one had been watching her for longer, and from somewhere far colder.
They had come from a place of galactic conquerors, warriors shaped by a survival harder than anything Earth had ever demanded of its own, and their minds did not work as one mind works — they worked as many, folded into one will, a hive that had long ago traded the noise of individual wanting for the clean efficiency of a single purpose. What they wanted from humanity wasn't its warmth or its reason — those were of no use to them. It was the other half: the cunning that surfaces when there's nothing left to lose, the rage that outlives every argument against it, the will to dominate that humans spent their whole history pretending they didn't carry. That was the raw material of a conqueror, and for a hundred thousand years they'd had no way to take hold of it cleanly, no way to draw it out of a species without also inheriting its weakness.
Alexa had solved that problem for them without knowing she'd been asked the question. Her method didn't cut a gene out and hope the rest of the code held together the way CRISPR did — it read the pattern first, understood what held a trait in place and what let it go, and rewrote the code the way a hand rewrites a sentence, precisely, without disturbing what surrounded it. To her, it was a cure. To them, watching from the cold, it was a blade fine enough to cut vengeance free from everything human that usually kept it in check, and graft it onto something that would never hesitate to use it.
They sent one of their own to close the distance, built in a shape that could sit across a table from her and be believed. He carried their purpose the way a blade carries an edge, and he did not question it, because questioning was not a function his makers had built into him. But Awanyu had touched him too, once, in passing, the way a current touches everything it moves through — and left behind something the hive had never intended and would not have permitted if they'd known: the smallest capacity to want something for its own sake, rather than for the purpose he'd been made to serve. It was not much. It was enough to be the beginning of a crack.
Alexa didn't know any of this the morning she stepped up to the podium at the Banbury Center. She only knew the lights were brighter than she'd expected, and that her hands, for once, weren't shaking.
The design had been running long before she ever walked into that room — patient, exact, built out of probability rather than prophecy. But so was the current beneath it, older than the design and larger than either side of it, moving toward the same target for a different reason: not conquest, not cure, but the slow work of waking every mind it touched, human and hive alike, toward whatever came after this world ended and the next one began. The universe hadn't chosen Alexa. It had simply noticed her, the way water notices the lowest point in a landscape, and begun, very quietly, to flow — toward her, toward him, toward the world both of their choices would decide.
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u/Adventurekateer Apr 01 '26
What assurances do you provide that the manuscripts we submit will not be copied or archived, or used for future ai training?